TIP 106: Organizing a Bookmark Hierarchy

Bookmarks form an interactive table of contents that lets your readers quickly see an outline of the contents of your document. For your readers' convenience, it makes sense to organize your list of bookmarks into a logical hierarchy. That is, the main headings expand to display lower-level headings, which in turn expand to display another heading level. From a technical standpoint, there's no limit to the number of levels you can use—but from a functional perspective, you probably shouldn't use more than three levels. More than three levels makes your list confusing, as you can see in the example shown in Figure 106a. The more nested levels you have, the more screen space is required to display them, which decreases the size of the Document pane and ultimately reduces the value of using bookmarks at all. What good is an interactive table of contents if the entire screen is filled with the table and you can't see the contents?

Figure 106a. Bookmarks can be nested in an infinite number of levels, but the content may be difficult to see and work with.